Islamofascism and the West

 

 Islamofascism and the West [60:07m]: Play Now | Play in Popup

Western Word Radio Interview With Norman Podhoretz

Originally Aired 11:00 Am (PST)

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Synopsis:

In this interview Norman Podhoretz and Avi Davis examine the influence of the Bush Doctrine on foreign policy and the way it will shape events in the coming years.  Podhoretz gives a detailed explanation of his thesis that the West is engaged in a fourth world war with Islamofascism and that not recognizing the breadth and scope of the challenges to Western civilization could place the West at a significant disadvantage in present and future conflicts.

Introduction:

Avi Davis: This is Avi Davis, and welcome to Western World Radio where we discuss issues relevant to the defense and protection of western values and ideals.  It’s not original, nor particularly insightful these days to declare that the events of September 11, 2001 changed America, and our lives, forever. And as tired as those words sound, they bear repeating because for millions of people throughout this country, September 11, 2001 does not represent the most flagrant attack on the United States in it’s history as much as the beginning of the governments eight-year long assault on civil liberties. The twisting of 9/11’s meaning, derived as it is and churned as it is in academia and media, by certain members of the political establishment and amongst the social elites, has been so effective that it has effectively obscured the motivation and origins of the attack, and the reality of the continuing security threat faced by this country.

There are few men in America that have been as vocal, or as passionate, in setting the record straight on this issue as our guest for today. Norman Podhoretz is a writer, commentator, journalist, and the former editor of Commentary Magazine – which he led for 35 years, from 1960 – 1995; and he’s presently Editor-at-Large. He’s the acknowledged founder of ­­­­the Conservative Movement, and has written over 15 books on a wide variety of subjects from the Prophets of Israel to his own memoirs of his life as a Leftist. His most recent book is World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, which we’ll be discussing today.

Norman Podhoretz, welcome to Western World Radio.

Norman Podhoretz: Well I’m delighted to be with you.

World War IV

Avi Davis: So, World War IV. That’s quite a controversial title and I’d like you to explain to our audience just how you derived that title and what happened to World War III?

Norman Podhoretz: Well World War III, as I see the history of the 20^th Century, was actually what we call The Cold War. It was a world war, characterized by a number of features that are being, in their own way, duplicated in what people have called “The War Against Terror” or “The Long War”. So I see the current war in which we’re engaged, World War IV, as the successor to the Cold War. Which was, in turn, the successor to World War II. In World War II we took on and defeated a totalitarian threat in the Reich, in the form of Nazi Germany. In World War III we took on and defeated a totalitarian threat from the Left in the form of the Soviet Union. Now we’re faced with another totalitarian threat which was born in the 7^th Century but actually became a political movement in the 20^th, and went to school at the feet of both the Nazi’s and the Communists in the course of their occupations of the Middle East. I call this new threat Islamofacism. Which, itself, has become a controversial term and I’m certainly willing to defend the use of it. So unfortunately, the term World War IV has not taken – I suppose partly because people will wonder, exactly as you asked me, well what became of World War III? I continue to believe that it is very difficult, almost impossible, to gain a proper understanding of this war without seeing it in the context of the two previous world wars. I also think it’s impossible to understand what we’re up against without naming the enemy and I believe that Islamofacism is the right name.

Avi Davis: Well let’s now define Islamofacism, because that also is a controversial term. So you have two controversial terms, in the very title of the book. How do you define it? Now, I say that in the context of how George Bush used it – he used it once, I believe in a speech in 2005, and never referred to it again in any speech that I’ve been able to find.

Norman Podhoretz: You’re right.

Avi Davis: Why is that?

Norman Podhoretz: Well in the case of Bush, there was a firestorm when he did use the term; and there was a great fear in Washington, there still is, of suggesting that we’re at war with the entire Muslim world. The 2 billion, or however many people, and in order to avert the suggestion of a religious war against Islam as a whole, the Bush Administration; and even more the Obama Administration, and most of the European countries as well, have shied away from using the term Islam at all. I believe in Britain it’s been banned. I know that in the United Nations there’s been an effort made to declare the use of the term Islamofascism as a form of hate-speech, and therefore a crime. I have actually been attacked by name by The Human Rights Commission, the farcical Human Rights Commission, and the General Assembly.

Why do I call it Islamofascism? It’s not a term that I, myself, invented. First of all, it does actually do the job that the politicians were worried about. It does distinguish this political movement from the religion of Islam. It’s a political movement that comes out of the religion of Islam, but it is a political movement. It’s association with fascism is both substantive and historical. Historical in the sense that we know that in World War II when the Nazi’s moved into the Middle East, and even before that, some of the Muslim Jihadists – we call them that, too, Holy Warriors – basically were influenced by the Nazis. Not only by Nazi ideology, but by Nazi ideas of political organization and the Mufti of Jerusalem, the Grand Mufti, for example, spent the war in Berlin and was an outspoken ally of Hitler. Hitler’s Mein Kampf was very popular in the Arab world, still is. So there is a connection; a physical, literal connection and an influence, historically. I think that the term fascist has always been a problematic term. There’s never been a precise definition of it, but we generally have used it to designate a totalitarian political system in which, not just political activity is circumscribed or repressed, but every aspect of life gets drawn into the political vortex and is controlled from the political center. That’s a new phenomenon that developed in the 20^th Century. Never before was there a tyranny or despotism that controlled every aspect of life: economic, religious, social.  This new form of despotism to which the name, Totalitarianism was given by Hana Arendt among other political theorists, is exactly what the Jihadists movement – that I call Islamofascism- has it’s roots in. So in that sense, substantively and historically, I think the term can be defended.

The Bush Doctrine: The Four Pillars

Avi Davis: The book you wrote, World War IV, is largely based on defense of the Bush Doctrine. There are many people, on the left particularly, but perhaps even on the right, who would say that there is no “Bush Doctrine”. That it was never properly articulated. I’d like you just to – for our audience’s benefit – you do this so clearly and articulately in the book, if you could just outline the four pillars of the Bush Doctrine as you see it.

Norman Podhoretz: People who say there is no Bush Doctrine are foolish. Mostly, people say there is a Bush Doctrine and it’s evil. It represents everything that’s bad about the United States. In any event, the Bush Doctrine – as you say – did have four pillars. First of all, it began after 9/11 with a renunciation of the moral relativism that pervades the Liberal culture in our time. Bush asserted unashamedly, unapologetically, that there was such a thing as good and such a thing as evil, which were in contention. He proposed to use those terms to describe both the enemy that attacked us on 9/11 as evil and the civilization that we represent, that we’re trying to defend, as good. This, of course, aroused an enormous firestorm all in the halls of Europe and in his own State Department. The idea that these are simplistic terms and there is no such thing as “good” and there is no such thing as “evil”; everything is a mixture of the two. But Bush asserted very clearly, with what I called “admiral moral clarity”, the reality of this distinction. That was the first pillar and it was articulated in a couple of his earliest speeches after 9/11.

The second pillar, which a lot of people think was a novel doctrine, but actually has precedent in American – and in the policy of most other nations – which is the right to take pre-emptive action against a gathering threat. As Bush put it, memorably, in the case of the Islamofascists which is a danger of their acquisition of weapons of mass destruction – whether nuclear or biological or chemical. If we wait before we take on, rather head off this threat, we will have waited too long he said. Pre-emption becomes an absolutely essential necessity in confronting an enemy like this. Which is difficult to locate, not people who go around wearing uniforms and issuing open declarations of war – as we have experienced in the past.

The third pillar  . . . (laughing) I’m beginning to show my age. You remind me what my third pillar was.

Avi Davis: The third pillar was the development of freedom.

Norman Podhoretz: Sorry. Right.

Avi Davis: (Laughing) Now you know that I read the book.

Norman Podhoretz: (Laughing) You read it more recently than I did. It’s now about two years since I read it.

Of course the third pillar was a new conception of what we might call the root causes of terrorism. The conventional view in the past had been that terrorism was a product of economic factors – poverty, despair – and that the way to deal with it is through economic development, economic aid. The view is not exactly Marxist, but it is rooted in the Marxist notion that everything is caused by economics. What Bush said was that the root cause of the terrorism we were faced with – by the way, terrorism being an instrument, a weapon rather than a phenomenon in its own right – the real cause was political rather than economic. That is the terrorists were bred in the swamp of politically stagnant societies, from which there was no hope for expression of grievances and no possibility of reform. He said one of the ways we had to fight this war was, as he put it, to drain the swamp in which terrorism breeds. That meant, as we discovered in the wake of the invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq, an effort to plant the seeds of democracy in the countries which had never experienced democratic freedoms. People attacked him for being naive and saying you can’t pose democracy on these cultures by force from the outside. No one, not Bush nor anybody who supported the Bush Doctrine, was that naïve. The idea was, and remains, that we could help clear the ground on which, and in which, democratic institutions could gradually develop. We’re seeing that happen very dramatically in Iraq; much faster than even I had expected, and to a lesser extent in Afghanistan, where there is another set of problems. That was the spread of the liberty and democracy based on the idea that political repression created these swamps in which the terrorist plague was hatched and bred.

The fourth pillar had to do with Israel and what people call the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict. I think it’s more properly understood against the Arab, or against the Jewish state. But in any event, what Bush did was he was the first American president to come out openly and explicitly for a Palestinian state. The Two State Solution, as it’s called, with an Israel and a Palestinian state living side by side in peace. The objective of this policy was that – and what Bush realized at a certain point was – given the fact that the Palestinians were led by a terrorist, Yassar Arafat, and the terrorist organization the PLO, there was a contradiction in supporting the Palestinian state at the same time as you were fighting a war against terrorists. So why would you create a new terrorist state when you were trying, at the same time, to eliminate the character of other terrorist states in the region. So, he really for the first time, attached conditions to American support to the establishment of the Palestinian state. The conditions were that the Palestinians were required to get themselves new leaders who were committed to a process of democratization and economic reform and a renunciation of terror, and a willingness to make peace and co-exist with Israel. These conditions he did, in fact, try to enforce. By the way, the other original aspect of the fourth pillar was that Bush also broadened the context of the conflict. It had come to be thought of as a conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, what Bush did was to restore the proper context which was, not just the Palestinians against Israel, but the entire Arab/Muslim world against Israel. He called on the surrounding countries to do their part in promoting the Two State Solution. He also repudiated, more implicitly than explicitly, the notion – which I believe is slightly demented to tell you the truth – that this problem of Israel and the Palestinians is the central problem of the Middle East. Indeed, as Tony Blair, when he was Prime Minister of England, once said, “of the entire world.” – the most serious problem of the entire world. If you solve that problem, everything else will fall into place. There is not only no evidence, there is a lot of evidence against it and Bush was not deluded as many of the Washington establishment were and continue to be. People like Brent Scowcroft, who had been the first President Bush’s National Security Advisor and Zbigniew Brzezinski, and the entire Council on Foreign Relations. What we call the foreign policy establishment all tended to adopt this view. Bush said no, this is not the central issue. The central issue is the political backwardness of the region, as he was proposing to try to change. This got him into trouble – as all the other pillars did – with the conventional foreign policy establishment, both in the United States and throughout the west.

Anti-Americanism in Europe

Avi Davis: Now, let me ask you a little bit about Europe because included in the articulation of the Bush Doctrine , Bush used some catch phrases, which are now famous. “You’re either with us or against us”, “access of evil” and others.  You quote Robert Kagan in illustrating how Europe turned against Bush and turned against America:

“Europe is turning away from power; or to put it a little differently, is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and trans-national negotiations and cooperation. It’s a post-historical paradise.”

You later take issue with some of the things that Kagan says, but I’m very interested to hear your perspective on Europe and why anti-Americanism really took off after 2001 – although it has always been there.

Norman Podhoretz: Before I answer the question, I want to agree with the very last thing you said. It’s always been there. You know, I spent three years in England as a student at the University of Cambridge between 1950 and 1953 and I can tell you that the anti-Americanism throughout Europe, not just in England – especially in France -  was intense and it was pervaded by the same themes that the anti-Americanism that we encounter in the wake of 9/11. On the left, people were saying that we were dragging the world to a precipice of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, charges were made that the United States was using germ warfare in Korea; so on one side, on the left, we were seen as a dangerous power ready to blow up the world.  And on the right, America was seen as barbaric culture, it used to said that  we were “ the only country that ever went from barbarism to decadence without an intervening period of civilization.” That was the crack that was made on the right. People said we were poisoning the world with Coca-Cola and hamburgers.

Avi Davis: That’s a favorite trope of Norman Mailer.

Norman Podhoretz:  Well, he picked that up again after 9/11. So it’s not new, it has a long history. But it is true that anti-Americanism became more intense, more widespread than it had been before. Why is this the case? Well, there are a lot of different reasons. You quoted Bob Kagan, his view – and it’s a view that’s widely shared – is that the Europeans see themselves as having moved into a better future in which there will be no more wars; all conflicts will be settled by negotiations, cooperation will replace competition – I forgot what other illusions are part of this package – they call it a sort of Kantian world of perpetual peace. Whereas the United States, in what some of their intellectuals call a Hobbesian World – after Thomas Hobbes, ‘the jungle’, basically. We’re predisposed to use force at the drop of a hat; we’re belligerent, we’re full of religious fanatics who have a huge influence on our policy; we act unilaterally without any consultation with our friends and allies; and in general we’re dangerous and retrograde. The point is, that where all of the qualities are embodied in the United States in this view – and especially in George Bush, who they saw sent by central casting as a representative of these reprehensible values – this is the past, we’re mired in the past and they have already passed over into the future and we just have to be forced to catch up.

My view is that it was under the Bush Doctrine, and led by George Bush, who by the way – and this will shock most of your listeners – I believe was not only not the worst president in American history but was a great president, on the level of Harry Truman whom he resembles in many respects and I think he’ll be recognized as such eventually. In any case, what I see is that the Europeans were mired in the past, not a Hobbesian past, but a past whose institutional framework had been constructed to fight the Cold War, right after the Second World War. Institutions like the U.N., the World Court, the International Criminal Court, the various economic arrangements such as Bretton Woods   and so on that were negotiated.  All of these institutions were instruments to fight, to do the non-military fighting inside of the Cold War struggle. The point about those institutions was that they gave the Europeans an exaggerated and unearned degree of power in international affairs.  When I say unearned I  mean traditionally, historically and still a power in international affairs depends on a nation’s military power and it’s willingness to maintain a sufficient military force so it can defend itself if attacked and deter others from attacking it. The Europeans, since the Second World War have simply not maintained – none of them, none of the European nations have maintained – such a military force. They basically all relied on the United States. We were, throughout the Cold War, sheltering them under the umbrella of our defenses. At the same time, pretending that they were equal partners in this struggle, which they never were. But maintaining that institutional structure, which is what they continue to want to do, does actually help them maintain the same exaggerated position that they were allowed to have before the Cold War. The New International Order that was envisioned by the Bush Doctrine – and that has unfortunately, not come to pass; although I think it will eventually – it diminishes their role and makes some implicit demands on them. It says, “You know, you’re going to have to become more independent. It means spending a lot more money on defense, less on six week paid vacations, in France, for example.” So, that’s my take.  In other words, I thought Kagan was exactly wrong in his assignment of future and past to the Europeans and the Americans. I think they saw the Bush Doctrine, in short, as a threat to their position and power in the international order and this, quite naturally, infuriated them.

1960’s Radicalism

Avi Davis: One of the most impressive and powerful sections of the book is where you deal with the left. You talk about how the radical left actually came to form the establishment; the establishment viewpoint and the institutionalization, essentially, of Vietnam Syndrome. I’m very interested to hear you give some further explanation about  this. How is this possible that 60’s radicalism, with it’s rejection of the exercise of power and it’s contempt for authority, has come to be so ingrained within establishment viewpoints these days.

Norman Podhoretz: I was, myself – as you mentioned earlier, part of that movement in the 1960’s. In fact, I was regarded as one of the intellectual leaders of the new radical movement of the 60’s. I grew disillusioned with it and turned against it toward the end of the decade. Since then I’ve been amongst its fiercest critics of the ideas and attitudes that came out of that movement, and that are still very much alive in somewhat altered mutations. What happened was this . . . to summarize this in a few sentences is hard for me. I’ve written no fewer than three books on this subject, but let me see what I can do in a few minutes:

The radicalism of the 60’s mostly challenged, not the right wing, but the liberal establishment. The right wing was so self-evidently evil to the radicals of that period that they didn’t bother talking about it. The enemy of the radicals was the liberal establishment, which was accused of partly being hypocritical about its own values and not living up to its own values. Its policies had failed to make a serious dent in the three major evils that the left attributed to American society: that is racism, the persistence of poverty and the persistence of war, that is the Cold War. The conflict, of course, with the Soviet Union, which the left constantly warned was on the brink of exploding into a nuclear war. If that happened, it would be America’s fault. America was blamed for the Cold War, in general, on the left. So, this movement, which consisted of a few lonely stragglers in the late 50’s and early 60’s, to my utter astonishment, by the mid-60’s (within five years) had swept like wildfire through the major institutions of the American establishment. By which I mean, since young people were heavily involved, the universities, the foreign policy establishment, the major media – what today we call the mainstream media – and basically what happened was that the liberals (what was called liberals in those days is very different from what we call liberals today) capitulated to the attack on them by the left and basically, surrendered. They said, we were wrong, you were right. They began adopting watered-down versions of their attitudes to an American society and toward world affairs. I’m leaving out the whole cultural side, with the counter-cultures, is related but a slightly different aspect. From that point on, from the late 60’s on, the first thing that happened was the takeover of the Democratic Party by young leftists who had decided to do what amount to what was once called, “the long march through the institutions”. Having been on the outside of the revolution, they decided to go inside and burrow inside. Again, in an astonishingly short time, people of this persuasion came behind George McGovern in 1972 and were able to take over the Democratic Party, one of the two major parties of the country. In the mean time there was a kind of a political, intellectual, trickle-down process going on by which the ideas and attitudes of the left went drop, drop, drop into the mainstream culture. I could go with this for about 10 hours, but that it’s roughly.

Barack Obama

Let me just jump to what you might be thinking of asking me anyway. Now, Barack Obama is a pure product of that culture. All his adult life, and I think even his childhood because of who his mother was, he lived in the left-wing culture. It’s what the French call his “formation”, it’s the default position. Here we have, again I say I’ve been astonished over and over again by the power of this movement that I had something to do with starting (from my sins), to achieve one great victory after another and the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States is it’s latest, and perhaps, greatest victory. We still don’t really know what Obama is going to be like now that he’s President. We do know, however, who he was and what he was like before he became President. They say he was very much a product of the left-wing culture that was born in the early 60’s. We are waiting to see how much of that is going to guide, mold and shape his policy as President. At the moment, I think that he came in and made some surprising appointments. Some people on the left who were defending him against others on the left who think he betrayed them by these, so called, right wing – they’re not right wing, appointments. People like Gates, Hillary Clinton, and General Jones, all of whom got high positions in his administration. Some people say he’s thinking right in order to move left and I suspect that may be the case.

Avi Davis:  We’ll come back to Obama in just a minute because I think that it’s a very, very important issue. But your book really identifies some furious opposition that Bush had to encounter, and it wasn’t just from the left. There was a certain defeatism on the right. There were realists, isolationists, liberal internationalists, media and even neo-cons who turned against the Bush Doctrine, or turned against Bush, at some point or another. How was it possible for him to execute the war in Iraq with this enormous opposition that he had to face? That’s one thing. Is it evidence of what you call “Invisible America”? Because he was obviously elected in 2004, defeating John Kerry who was against the war and threatened to pull out American troops from Iraq. Is “Invisible America” the kind of America Pauline Kael alluded to when she said, “. I don’t know why Nixon got elected because I don’t know anybody who voted for him.”

Norman Podhoretz: The question is how did Bush manage? Well, I used to say I don’t understand how that guy can get out of bed in the morning, let alone do what he has to do as President given the fantastic degree of opposition and hatred he encounters. I’ve never seen anything like it. I would have thought before that the hatred of Nixon was the high water mark and Reagan coming in second; but I think the hatred of Bush trumps both of those presidents. They now have what they call Bush Derangement Syndrome.

Avi Davis: Let me clarify, for you, the question. Is the support for the Bush Doctrine, and for Bush himself, evidenced within the electorate? In other words, was there grassroots support for Bush that vitiated against this defeatism, realism and isolationism  and the media.

Norman Podhoretz: Let me back up a bit. As you rightly said, I tried to analyze and break down the various components of opposition to the Bush Doctrine and explain why each of them was opposed. All these people are very happy at the moment because they feel vindicated. Things are back, so to speak, to normal after this interlude of Bush’s destruction of what they consider all the true pillars of our foreign policy. There were, as you say, people on the right who had their own reasons for opposing him and even some of his earliest supporters turned against him (some of the neo-con supporters) most of those turned against him because they felt he wasn’t living up to the promises of his own doctrine. In other words, they were attacking him from the right, so to speak. Others felt that it wasn’t working. This is true of the most famous of them, Francis Fukuyama, that we were losing the war in Iraq; that it was a doomed enterprise; that it had been a big mistake and they saw it, rightly, as a test case of the Bush Doctrine. They said well, the Bush Doctrine failed the test case, time to give it up and time to get rid of Bush. I defend Bush against all these criticisms in my book. I’m not the only defender of Bush left, but one of the very few, but I still think we’re right.

Avi Davis: It’s a very lonely position.

Norman Podhoretz: Well that’s OK. I’m used to that.  Now, you want me to try to explain how he managed to pursue the war and stay the course. We were talking about support within the country. Let me go back. I think there was 2006 Congressional Election which the Republics suffered heavy defeat in both houses. This was interpreted by almost everybody; the Democrats thought the message of that election was, “Get out of Iraq.” That is not, in my opinion, what the voters were saying. I think they were saying, “Either win, or get out.” That’s a very important difference. Willing if we’re going to win, okay – but if we’re losing, it’s ridiculous let’s get out. Now Bush took that message to heart and he decided that the strategy that had been followed by his, then, Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and the generals who were running the show under Rumsfeld that this strategy was not working; that a radical change in the strategy was necessary. He found a couple of generals who were advocating such a change, came to be known as The Surge. He decided, against almost universal opposition within his own administration, to go with this new strategy. He fired Rumsfeld, he got rid of the generals who had been running the war and he found new generals that were willing to try the new strategy and it was almost a miraculous success and has been. People say Bush was terrible, three years he wasted. I often point out it took Lincoln, our greatest president, three years to find the right general to win the civil war. In Lincoln’s case there was several hundred thousand people killed, in Bush’s case it was three or four thousand. In any case that’s what happened. He was bold and brave enough to take this risk and gamble and it paid off. We see the results in what has been happening in Iraq: the diminution of American casualties and Iraqi casualties, the political evolution that was reflected in the elections that were just held, and the provincial elections that were just held. The increasing competence of the Iraqi forces, both military and police, to look after their own defense. The whole thing has been turned around to the point where, Barack Obama, who was against the war to begin with and who said the surge would fail, was against the surge, has had to admit that it has succeeded beyond anybody’s wildest dreams.

Avi Davis: Given that it has succeeded, it’s puzzling why the Bush Doctrine was not applied with as much forcefulness in the last three years of his administration. Was that due largely to the appointment of Condoleeza Rice as Secretary of State?

Norman Podhoretz: I think Condoleeza Rice is a very large part of the explanation. Let me back up. Bush had, throughout his first term, to contend with an insubordinate State Department. Understand, in the American system, the Secretary of State works through the President. That’s an arm of the Executive Branch, so is the Secretary of Defense and the CIA, he’s their boss. Now, during the first term, when Colin Powell was Secretary of State and there was George Tenet in CIA. Somebody with more authority on these matters than I have, namely Henry Kissinger, once said that this was the most insubordinate State Department in American history and the CIA was also insubordinate. That was, both the State Department and the CIA were actively trying to sabotage the Bush’s policy, the Bush Doctrine. People there………

Avi Davis: That’s very clearly outlined in Douglas Feith’s book, War and Decision.

Norman Podhoretz: That’s right and there’s absolutely no question about it. Bush’s greatest weakness, though I’m not sure if he had been able to do anything about if he were a better manager, his inability to seize control of those bureaucracies and force them to do what they’re supposed to do. When he appointed Condoleeza Rice, who was very close to him and had been in the White House as National Security Advisor, who was very loyal, was an eloquent spokesman for the Bush Doctrine. When he sent her over to the State Department, the idea was that she would control it, try to shape it, and get it to support the policy. Instead, she went native. She adopted the position of the State Department. There’s a big story there that someday we’ll know. There’s a great book to be written about that.

Avi Davis: The corollary to that question is why George Bush did not launch a military strike against Iran. Urged on him certainly, by the neo-conservative claque in Washington. Will it actually be one of the blots on his record that he did not?

Norman Podhoretz: I’m afraid it will, though I sympathize with him. I know how enormously difficult it would have been for him to attempt such a thing. He might have even had a mutiny on his hands from the armed forces. That’s shocking thing to contemplate. But there was so much opposition to a military strike on Iran, within the military, that he may well have feared that they actually would not have carried out the order.  I don’t think that’s out of the question. But it is a blot, and he, himself, made it into a blot.  He said several times in public that if we don’t stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, people 50 years from now will look back at us the way we look back at Munich who didn’t stop Hitler and say how can they have allowed this to happen.  I saw it, especially the third time he said it – the third time he said it was right after the CIA tried, quite successfully, to sabotage the entire possibility by issuing reports saying, basically, that there was nothing to worry about; that the Iranians aren’t working on a bomb. That pretty much knocked the stuffing out of, what I believe at that time, was still Bush’s intention to launch a strike. In any case, I kept telling people why would he put himself in the historical dark and invite people of the future to condemn him as worse than Neville Chamberlain and the others who made Munich, if he wasn’t going to act.

Avi Davis: Maybe he was just putting on record that he wanted to do it, but he had just used up his political capital.

Norman Podhoretz: Well, that may very well be the case because I know that he did want to do it. I can’t say I know. I have good reason to believe he wanted to do it. I discussed the whole matter with him once, at good length. But the fact is that he was unable to, first of all to get his own administration behind him and secondly, to persuade the public to back him. I think, in the end, he must have decided that he was going to have to rely, not just on the hope of tougher sanctions, but also of some covert action. Apparently it’s been going on, I don’t know anything about it except what I read in the papers, but evidently he authorized some covert action, which was intended to try to sabotage some of those nuclear facilities. We don’t know. He would pray that this would work.

I don’t think the way things are going that Iran will be prevented from getting nuclear weapons and my fears are apocalyptic.  Because if Iran gets the bomb, having over and over again vowed to wipe the state of Israel off the map, the Israelis are sitting there and they have to ask themselves – are we going to wait to be attacked and then retaliate if we’re still capable? The Iranians are going to be sitting there saying to themselves, well the Israelis are liable to pre-empt any minute now so we better beat them to the punch. Under those circumstances, one or other is going to launch a nuclear strike. I don’t see how it could be avoided. It’s the scariest development we’ve had since the nuclear age began. I believe it the closest, even closer than the Cuban Missile Crisis, if Iran gets the bomb. People, including Bush, were saying (and Obama is now saying) they mustn’t get the bomb because it will set off nuclear arms race in the region. I hope there would be time for a nuclear arms race in the region. If I’m right, there will be shortly after they get the bomb and they now have the means of delivery, even before they tested an intercontinental missile, they already had missiles that could reach Israel. For the life of me I can’t see how it can be avoided, once they get the bomb. I have a very realistic scenario.

Avi Davis: I agree with you. I think it is realistic and I think that we have to prepare in this country for a missile defense. Our missile defenses need to be  little bit better than we’ve had up until now. That’s a subject we’ll be addressing next week actually with a number of commentators.

In the last five minutes we have , I wanted to ask you – in your epilogue you ask the question of whether the new president, and of course this was written in 2006, so you didn’t know that Obama would be the president, whether he would acknowledge there was no serious alternative to the strategy enunciated by Bush. Because a return to law enforcement and  law based approaches have proven so ineffectual for combating terrorism. How do you feel about that now?

Norman Podhoretz: It will amaze you to hear actually I’ve been saying about Obama that I still think its possible that this administration will come to recognize that there is no serious alternative to that strategy for fighting the war, except not fighting the war. Now its entirely possible and, I fear likely, that from the way not only Obama himself but a lot of his people talk, that they will decide that this is not a war at all. Those of us who call it a war are crazy; it’s just a nuisance, as John Kerry called it. It doesn’t rise to the level of a war. Therefore, all the instruments that Bush set into motion to fight that war have to be eliminated. That includes internal surveillance, the Patriot Act, tracking of bank deposits, and how we treat captured terrorists. If you have a bet, you’d have to bet that that’s where we’re going. That’s the path we’re headed on with this administration. On the other hand, I think something may concentrate the minds of the people in power now – not just the President himself – God forbid another attack would wipe out all the illusions that are circulating about the threat. But even short of another attack, it’s possible that things will happen, unforeseeable things, that will simply force these people to realize that unless they’re willing to let the country go down the tubes, that they’ve got to fight back. I’m hoping against hope that this will happen to them without the benefit of another attack.

Avi Davis: So you do believe Barack Obama accepts that there is a war on terrorism.

Norman Podhoretz: No! He doesn’t accept that there is a war on terrorism. I’m sorry. I guess I didn’t make myself clear. No, he said pretty explicitly that there is not. He’s taken the view that there is terrorism and we have to do something about it, but it’s not a war. It’s a police action.

Avi Davis: So in saying that he is effectively reversing the Bush Doctrine.

Norman Podhoretz: That is exactly right. He is going back to what some people call pre-9/11 thinking. What I’m suggesting now, that he may – in the course of his presidency – be forced to rethink this whole idea and recognize that it is a war and there is basically only one strategy by which it can be fought. I compare this to what happened when Eisenhower become president after Truman. The truth is, I’m not sanguine enough about this possibility but on the other hand, I can’t accept, or easily contemplate, the idea that we have a president who is going to let the country burn while he fiddles.

Avi Davis: The analogy with Truman and Eisenhower is very, very interesting. You do actually state in the book that you believe that Bush will be rehabilitated eventually and that he will also be regarded as one of our great presidents. Of course, as I said before, I happen to agree with that position but it is a very lonely position to take because in the glare of history, you know it’s very, very difficult to come to conclusions about events as they happen now.

Norman Podhoretz: Truman left office with ratings even lower than Bush’s. 50 years later the historians were all saying he was a great president. We’ll see, I won’t live to see it, but hopefully it’s going to happen.

Avi Davis: I want to thank you very much for joining us today and I want to ask our audience to join us next week when we deal with missile defense and have a one and half hour panel to address it.

Thank you very much for joining in.

Norman Podhoretz: Thank you.